Salman Rushdie Wins Booker Prize for Novel - NYTimes.com Salman Rushdie Wins Booker Prize for Novel Published: October 28, 1981 Salman Rushdie, author of ''Midnight's Children,'' about India, has received the 1981 Booker Prize for the best novel of the year. The British literary prize carries a cash award of $5,500. ''Midnight's Children'' was published in the United States in April by Alfred A. Knopf. Mr. Rushdie's 1979 novel, ''Grimus,'' was published here by the Overlook Press and is being reissued in a trade-paperback edition. Mr. Rushdie, who was born in Bombay in 1947, studied at Kings College, Cambridge, and lives in London. Previous winners of the prize are Nadine Gordimer, Iris Murdoch and V.S. Naipaul.

Salman Rushdie named best Booker Prize winner of all time - Telegraph Salman Rushdie named best Booker Prize winner of all time Salman Rushdie, 'the best Booker Prize winner of all time' By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor 12:01AM BST 10 Jul 2008 Paper Tiger: Best of Booker? The Best of the Booker title was bestowed by public vote, conducted to mark the 40th anniversary of the literary award. Rushdie was always the favourite, chosen from a shortlist of six which included works by JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Pat Barker, Peter Carey and JG Farrell. But the win raised a question: how many of those who voted for Midnight's Children have actually read it? A survey has found that only one in 25 people had read Rushdie's sprawling Indian tale. And of those, only half had finished it. The novel, widely regarded as the author's masterpiece, won the Booker Prize in 1981. It went on to take the Booker of Bookers in 1993, an award to mark 25 years of the award.

Related Articles 5 July 2008[Arts]: Re-reading the best of the Booker 10 Jul 2008 Graham Sharpe of bookmaker William Hill predicted that Rushdie's book would walk away with the prize. "Midnight's Children has come to occupy a similar position to Sgt Pepper. There's a kneejerk reaction from people who haven't read it but think it's the correct thing to say when asked," he said. Victoria Glendinning, the biographer and critic who chaired the Best of the Booker panel, said the voting public had made the right choice. "It couldn't have been anything else, really. Midnight's Children is a 'before and after' book. Before it came out, there was this rather tender, authors wrote rather tenderly about India, and from a Western viewpoint. Rushdie plunged you right in there.

Afterwards, no-one could write in the same way about India or the Commonwealth again." The other five books on the shortlist - chosen by the panel of judges - were The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell (1973), The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (1974), Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988), Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999) and The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (1995). The list was notable because some of the 'big beasts' of the book world were left off it, such as Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, while no books since the turn of the century had been chosen. Glendinning said: "When we were choosing the shortlist, we didn't think about dates, or gender, or geography, or anything like that. I am only sorry that we didn't have room for any quiet books, books about personal or domestic life.

What did seem to come out of our reading was that the great subjects of so many of these novels was the end of the Empire and the two World Wars." Rushdie said he was "absolutely delighted" to receive the award. The author is currently on a book tour in the US with his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence. His sons, Zafar and Milan, attended a ceremony at London's South Bank Centre to collect the trophy. The 61-year-old author, forced into hiding in 1989 when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him for publication of The Satanic Verses, received a knighthood last month for services to literature. Midnight's Children book review - 1981 Booker Prize Publisher’s synopsis: Born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, at the precise moment of India’s independence, the infant Saleem Sinai is celebrated in the press and welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru himself.

But this coincidence of birth has consequences Saleem is not prepared for: telepathic powers that connect him with 1,000 other “midnight’s children” – all born in the initial hour of India’s independence – and an uncanny sense of smell that allows him to sniff out dangers others can’t perceive. Inextricably linked to his nations, Saleem’s biography is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious. Extract: My grandfather peered around the room. “But where is she, Ghani Sahib?” he blurted out finally. The lady wrestlers adopted supercilious expressions and, it seemed to him, tightened their musculatures, just in case he intended to try something funny. “Ah, I see your confusion,” Ghani said, his poisonous smile broadening. “You Europe-returned chappies forget certain things. Doctor Sahib, my daughter is a decent girl, it goes without saying. She does not flaunt her body under the noses of strange men. You will understand that you cannot be permitted to see her, no, not in any circumstances….” A frantic note had crept into Doctor Aziz’s voice.

“Ghani Sahib, tell me how I am to examine her without looking at her?” Ghani smiled on. “You will kindly specify which portion of my daughter it is necessary to inspect. I will then issue her with my instructions to place the required segment against that hole which you see there. And so, in this fashion the thing may be achieved.” Salman Rushdie in line to win the Booker Prize Rushdie favourite for best Booker Prize winner award 12th May 2008 Salman Rushdie is the favourite to win the Best of the Booker prize after his novel "Midnight's Children" was shortlisted Monday for the "greatest of the greatest" award. Six books chosen from the 41 winners of the highly-regarded Booker Prize are up for the award. The Booker Prize, one of the literary world's most prestigious awards, goes to the best work of fiction by an author from the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. "Midnight's Children", the bookmaker's favourite for the award, was Indian-born Rushdie's second novel and won the 1981 Booker Prize.

It also scooped the Booker of Bookers -- the only other time a celebratory award has been created for the prize -- in 1993. The second favourite to win is South African-born author JM Coetzee. The 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, who emigrated to Australia in 2002, is nominated for "Disgrace", which won the 1999 Booker. The book is the most recent novel on the shortlist, while the oldest is "The Siege of Krishnapur" by the late British author JG Farrell, which won the Booker in 1973. South African author Nadine Gordimer is shortlisted for "The Conservationist" (1974), while Australian author Peter Carey is nominated for "Oscar and Lucinda" (1988), the first of his two Booker prize winners. "The Ghost Road", by British writer Pat Barker, a winner in 1995, is also on the shortlist, which was drawn up by a panel of judges. The prize will be voted for by the public, with the winner announced at the Southbank Centre in London on July 10.

Judges chair Victoria Glendinning said selecting the shortlist was a tough task. "We really feel that the six novels we picked represent the best fiction-writing of the past 40 years and that each one of them will stand the test of time," she said. "As to which of the six is the most important, and the most enjoyable, the Best of Booker -- that is up to the readers to decide." Rushdie is the favourite to win at odds of 5-1, according to bookmakers William Hill, followed by Coetzee (10-1), Barker (20-1), Carey (25-1), Gordimer (40-1) and Farrell (80-1). A total of 41 books have won the prize since it was launched in 1969, because the award was shared in 1974 and 1992. Contenders must have been published in the past year and originally written in English. Booker Prize nomination all but guarantees worldwide readership and an upsurge in book sales.

Copyright Speakers Corner 2017 Tel: +44 (0)20 7607 7070 Fax: +44 (0)20 7700 8847 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - Author Biography • Education—M.A., King's College, Cambridge, UK • Awards—Booker Prize, 1981 (named the best novel to win the Booker Prize in its first twenty-five years in 1993); Whitbread Prize, 1988 and 1995 • Currently—lives in New York, New York Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent.

Death threats were made against him, including a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on February 14, 1989. Rushdie was appointed Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States, where he has worked at the Emory University and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book is Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the Satanic Verses controversy.

Career Rushdie's first career was as a copywriter, working for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with "irresistibubble" for Aero and "Naughty but Nice" for cream cakes, and for the agency Ayer Barker, for whom he wrote the memorable line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. It was while he was at Ogilvy that he wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer. John Hegarty of Bartle Bogle Hegarty has criticised Rushdie for not referring to his copywriting past frequently enough, although conceding: "He did write crap ads...admittedly." His first novel, Grimus, a part-science fiction tale, was generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next novel, Midnight's Children, catapulted him to literary notability. This work won the 1981 Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, was awarded the Best of the Bookers as the best novel to have received the prize during its first 25 and 40 years.

Midnight's Children follows the life of a child, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with special powers and a connection to other children born at the dawn of a new and tumultuous age in the history of the Indian sub-continent and the birth of the modern nation of India. The character of Saleem Sinai has been compared to Rushdie. However, the author has refuted the idea of having written any of his characters as autobiographical, stating... People assume that because certain things in the character are drawn from your own experience, it just becomes you. In that sense, I’ve never felt that I’ve written an autobiographical character. After Midnight's Children, Rushdie wrote Shame, in which he depicts the political turmoil in Pakistan, basing his characters on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Shame won France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book) and was a close runner-up for the Booker Prize. Both these works of postcolonial literature are characterised by a style of magic realism and the immigrant outlook that Rushdie is very conscious of as a member of the Indian diaspora.

Rushdie wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua in 1987 called The Jaguar Smile. This book has a political focus and is based on his first-hand experiences and research at the scene of Sandinista political experiments. His most controversial work, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 (see below). Rushdie has published many short stories, including those collected in East, West (1994). The Moor's Last Sigh, a family epic ranging over some 100 years of India's history was published in 1995. The Ground Beneath Her Feet presents an alternative history of modern rock music. The song of the same name by U2 is one of many song lyrics included in the book, hence Rushdie is credited as the lyricist. He also wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories in 1990. Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels. His 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown received, in India, the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and was, in Britain, a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards.

It was shortlisted for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In his 2002 non-fiction collection Step Across This Line, he professes his admiration for the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American writer Thomas Pynchon, among others. His early influences included James Joyce, Günter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Lewis Carroll. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter and praised her highly in the foreword for her collection Burning your Boats. His latest novel is Luka and the Fire of Life, published in November 2010. Earlier in the same year, he announced that he was writing his memoirs, entitled Joseph Anton: A Memoir, which was published in September 2012. In 2012, Salman Rushdie became one of the first major authors to embrace Booktrack (a company that synchronises ebooks with customised soundtracks) when he published his short story "In the South" on the platform.

Other Activities Rushdie has quietly mentored younger Indian (and ethnic-Indian) writers, influenced an entire generation of Indo-Anglian writers, and is an influential writer in postcolonial literature in general. He has received many plaudits for his writings, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), and the Writer of the Year Award in Germany and many of literature's highest honours. Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006 and founder of the PEN World Voices Festival. He opposed the British government's introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, something he writes about in his contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays by several writers. In 2007 he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has also deposited his archives. In May 2008 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Though he enjoys writing, Salman Rushdie says that he would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful.

Even from early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood movies (which he later realised in his frequent cameo appearances). Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his writings. He had a cameo appearance in the film Bridget Jones's Diary based on the book of the same name, which is itself full of literary in-jokes. On May 12, 2006, Rushdie was a guest host on The Charlie Rose Show, where he interviewed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, whose 2005 film, Water, faced violent protests. He appears in the role of Helen Hunt's obstetrician-gynecologist in the film adaptation of Elinor Lipman's novel Then She Found Me. In September 2008, and again in March 2009, he appeared as a panellist on the HBO program Real Time with Bill Maher. Rushdie is currently collaborating on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel Midnight's Children with director Deepa Mehta. The film will be released in October, 2012.

Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund, a non-profit organisation which provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, an advocacy group representing the interests of atheistic and humanistic Americans in Washington, D.C. In November 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new liberal arts college that has adopted as its motto a Latin translation of a phrase ("free speech is life itself") from an address he gave at Columbia University in 1991 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Satanic Verses and the fatwa The publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was perceived as an irreverent depiction of the prophet Muhammad. The title refers to a disputed Muslim tradition that is related in the book. According to this tradition, Muhammad (Mahound in the book) added verses (sura) to the Qur'an accepting three goddesses who used to be worshipped in Mecca as divine beings.

According to the legend, Muhammad later revoked the verses, saying the devil tempted him to utter these lines to appease the Meccans (hence the "Satanic" verses). However, the narrator reveals to the reader that these disputed verses were actually from the mouth of the Archangel Gibreel. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities. On February 14, 1989, a fatwa requiring Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam." A bounty was offered for Rushdie's death, and he was thus forced to live under police protection for several years. On March 7, 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy. The publication of the book and the fatwa sparked violence around the world, with bookstores firebombed. Muslim communities in several nations in the West held public rallies, burning copies of the book. Several people associated with translating or publishing the book were attacked and even killed.

On September 24, 1998, as a precondition to the restoration of diplomatic relations with Britain, the Iranian government gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie." Hardliners in Iran have continued to reaffirm the death sentence. In early 2005, Khomeini's fatwa was reaffirmed by Iran's current spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a message to Muslim pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Additionally, the Revolutionary Guards have declared that the death sentence on him is still valid. Iran has rejected requests to withdraw the fatwa on the basis that only the person who issued it may withdraw it, and the person who issued it – Ayatollah Khomeini – has been dead since 1989. Rushdie has reported that he still receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on February 14 letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him. He said, "It's reached the point where it's a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat." A memoir of his years of hiding, Joseph Anton, was published in 2012.

Joseph Anton was Rushdie's secret alias. In 2012, following uprisings over an anonymously posted YouTube video denigrating Muslims, a semi-official religious foundation in Iran increased the reward it had offered for the killing of Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million dollars. Their stated reason: "If the [1989] fatwa had been carried out, later insults in the form of caricature, articles and films that have continued would have not happened." Knighthood Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours on June 16, 2007. He remarked, "I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour, and am very grateful that my work has been recognised in this way." In response to his knighthood, many nations with Muslim majorities protested. Several called publicly for his death. Some non-Muslims expressed disappointment at Rushdie's knighthood, claiming that the writer did not merit such an honour and there were several other writers who deserved the knighthood more than Rushdie. Al-Qaeda has condemned the Rushdie honour.

The Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is quoted as saying in an audio recording that Britain's award for Indian-born Rushdie was "an insult to Islam", and it was planning "a very precise response." Religious Beliefs Rushdie came from a Muslim family though he is an atheist now. In 1990, in the "hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him," he issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam in his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world. However, Rushdie later said that he was only "pretending". Personal Life Rushdie has been married four times. He was married to his first wife Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar (born 1980). His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; they were married in 1988 and divorced in 1993. His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan (born 1999).

In 2004, he married the Indian American actress and model Padma Lakshmi, the host of the American reality-television show Top Chef. The marriage ended on July 2, 2007, with Lakshmi indicating that it was her desire to end the marriage. In 1999 Rushdie had an operation to correct ptosis, a tendon condition that causes drooping eyelids and that, according to him, was making it increasingly difficult for him to open his eyes. "If I hadn't had an operation, in a couple of years from now I wouldn't have been able to open my eyes at all," he said. Since 2000, Rushdie has "lived mostly near Union Square" in New York City. (Adapted from Wikipedia.) BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Rushdie wins Best of Booker prize Rushdie wins Best of Booker prize Rushdie also won the Booker of Bookers award in 1993 Sir Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children has won the Best of the Booker prize, as voted for by the public. The 1981 book beat five other former Booker winners shortlisted from the prize's 40-year history.

Sir Salman, who was unable to attend the London ceremony as he is currently on tour in the US, sent his thanks via a pre-recorded message. It is the third Booker award for the author, who was also the winner of the Booker of Bookers in 1993. "Marvellous news - I'm absolutely delighted and would like to thank all those readers around the world who voted for Midnight's Children," the author said. 'Readers have spoken' His sons, Zafar and Milan, were in attendance at the award ceremony at London's South Bank Centre to receive the custom-made trophy. "It's a wonderful alternative to have my real children accepting the prize on behalf of my imaginary children," Sir Salman said.

BEST OF BOOKER NOMINEES Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (won in 1981; also the previous winner of the Booker Of Bookers, in 1993) Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999) Oscar And Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988) The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (1974) The Siege Of Krishnapur by JG Farrell (1973) The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (1995) When voting closed at 1200 BST on 8 July, 7,801 people had voted via online and text, with 36% voting for Midnight's Children. Peter Carey, Pat Barker, JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and JG Farrell were also shortlisted for the prize. The shortlist was chosen by a panel of experts including novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup. "The readers have spoken - in their thousands. And we do believe that they have made the right choice," Glendinning said. She added that Midnight's Children had won by a "quite a large margin".

The Booker Prize, which was first awarded in 1969, has spawned 41 winners because it was shared between two authors in 1974 and 1992. Booker judges give 'patchy' Rushdie the thumbs down | Books | The Guardian Booker judges give 'patchy' Rushdie the thumbs down · Enchantress of Florence fails to make shortlist · Rebuff for writer who topped public poll Charlotte Higgins , chief arts writer Tuesday 9 September 2008 19.01 EDT Close This article is 8 years old Salman Rushdie , by far the biggest name on the Man Booker prize longlist, has been snubbed as the judges whittled down the names from 13 to a six-strong shortlist of "page-turners". The Enchantress of Florence was the favourite to win the prize before the announcement of the shortlist. Midnight's Children, which won the award in 1981, was this year voted the best of the Bookers in a public poll. "I think Rushdie's writing is patchy, to be honest," said broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli, a member of the judging panel.

"He has written some good books and some not-so good books. There is no doubting the man's massive intellect. But I have never known a book split the public so much as Midnight's Children. People will secretly confess to not finishing. Others will secretly confess to hating it. For others, it is the one book they would take to their grave." Nor did the judges agonise unduly over Rushdie's exclusion. "In the opinions of five people taken together, The Enchantress of Florence simply wasn't one of the top six books," said the former MP Michael Portillo, the chair of the judges. "I wouldn't say we had a heated debate over it. We certainly had passionate debates - but there wasn't a particularly passionate debate over this book." Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, the other really weighty name on the longlist, also failed to make the cut. There was an unusual degree of consensus among the judges, said Portillo. "At every stage there were some books that just leaped out at you." The panel ended up with a list they described as "page-turning" and "readable".

According to Portillo: "We have brought you fun." The biggest names on the list are Sebastian Barry, for The Secret Scripture; Linda Grant, for The Clothes on Their Backs; and Philip Hensher, for The Northern Clemency. The others are Amitav Ghosh's multilayered epic Sea of Poppies, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, a novel about modern India; and Steve Toltz's anarchic A Fraction of the Whole. The last two are both debut novels. Portillo said it was a shortlist of "quite epic stories. Both the Toltz and the Hensher, for instance, are written on an epic scale; while The Secret Scripture encompasses 80 years of Irish history." He stopped short of describing any of the books as masterpieces, however. "It doesn't matter whether I will or will not use that word, because I am not a literary expert," he said. "The word masterpiece is probably overused." Ion Trewin, the literary director of Man Booker prizes, said that readability had not been consciously sought by the judges, but "it was only when the list was settled we realised it was the most readable in years".

He added: "The whole point of the prize when it was set up was to get literary fiction out to a large audience," describing the Man Booker as "Richard and Judy for grown-ups". Singh Kohli said: "It is not for me to criticise past shortlists. But I have felt that obtuseness has been celebrated somewhat in the past. I want a book to tell me a story - and put me in the company of great characters." The novelist Louise Doughty, another judge, said: "The ability to come up with a good plot and create a good structure are great literary qualities - it is not just about how to make a finely turned sentence. The ability to move a story on in an engaging way, and the creation of character - these are great literary skills." The bookies' favourite at 2-1 is Barry's novel; but Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole is also causing excitement in some quarters, as is Sea of Poppies, the first part of a trilogy that opens on the eve of the opium war, described by Portillo as "a swashbuckling, buccaneering kind of story".

The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced on October 14. Last year's winner, Anne Enright's The Gathering, has sold more than 200,000 copies in Britain. Salman Rushdie tells Stuart Jeffries about erotic encounters, defying death threats and his next book | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Salman Rushdie is sitting at the desk of Rabbi Judith Lazarus Siegal sipping Grey Goose vodka. This seems the wrong thing to do in a Jewish temple, but apparently it isn't: another rabbi drops by to suggest that he gets his juicer and we make daiquiris. The author politely declines: he takes his vodka neat. It's a literary thing. "Vikram Seth apparently likes a clear drink in his glass too when he gives readings," says Rushdie, "though in his case I believe it's gin." Rushdie is waiting in Rabbi Siegal's office at the Temple Judea in suburban Miami to give a reading. It's the 25th date of a 29-city US book tour to promote his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence. The original bookshop venue was too small for the crowd they are expecting.

"After JK Rowling, I guess I'm the biggest literary turn from the UK," he says. Tomorrow night he will be in Milwaukee, then Chicago, then Madison. Each night, it is the same deal: a 20-minute reading and then some Q and A. "It used to be an hour of reading, but there isn't the patience for that any more." Questions, he says, recur. Any tips for young writers? Does he consider himself, as an Anglo-Indian novelist, to be subverting the Eurocentric literary canon? What's the deal with that whole fatwa thing? Rushdie will be glad when it's over. "I have always thought," he says, "the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book." That secret purpose is working on Rushdie. Later this month, he will start writing a new novel. "I'm thinking of writing a children's book. My younger son is 11, which is the age my older son was when I wrote a book for him, so now Milan is saying: 'Where's my book?'" I don't believe Rushdie hates book tours.

He gets a buzz from all this. He likes how, on the way to the reading, a Costa Rican bellhop called George shakes his hand firmly and says it's a great honour to meet a "real, live genius". Who wouldn't? He loves doing the jokey warm-up routine before the reading. He probably isn't disappointed that in the front row are lots of women clutching copies of his book that they yearn to get signed later. Why shouldn't Rushdie revel in this approval after spending the best part of his literary career under a very real threat of being murdered? He even seems to get a weird kick from signing books. "You know what," he told me earlier as we rode the lift down from his hotel suite on the 32nd floor, "I beat Jimmy Carter in his home state." How so? "I signed 475 copies in an hour when I was in Atlanta. But that was nothing. In Nashville, I signed 1,000 copies in an hour, which I think is a record." And there is more to celebrate. He has just won an award called the Best of the Booker to mark the 40th year of the Booker prize .

Confusingly, it is the third time he and his novel Midnight's Children have been honoured with a Booker-related gong. In 1981, the post-colonial, postmodern magical-realist novel about the birth of India and the death of the British Raj won the Booker prize, catapulting Rushdie to fame and enabling him to quit his job in an ad agency. The book became a global bestseller. "I got a £1,500 advance." That's rubbish, I suggest. "I know. I fired my agent." In 1993, to celebrate the Booker prize's 25th year, Midnight's Children was chosen as the "Booker of Bookers" by a jury of three former chairs of judges. "They included Bill Webb [the Guardian's former literary editor] and Malcolm Bradbury. Malcolm, when he was chair of judges in 1981, had not voted for Midnight's Children, so go figure." Go figure: now a resident of New York, Rushdie the cultural chameleon is really mastering those Americanisms.

For the Best of Booker, three judges selected a shortlist of six previous Booker winners - Pat Barker's The Ghost Road (1995), Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda (1988), JM Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), JG Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974) and Midnight's Children - and then the public voted on their favourite. Rushdie won by a huge margin. Some critics (including Neel Mukherjee in a Guardian blog) poured scorn on this award, suggesting it is worthless and typifies the British tendency to rank every last little thing by means of increasingly fatuous democratic votes. But Rushdie is pleased to win it. He will not collect the award in person but has deputed his sons Zafar and Milan to do so. "What's especially gratifying is that more than 50% of those who voted for Midnight's Children are under 35," he says. "The book has leaped the generations, which is wonderful for me. I feared it might just be a topical book about the birth of India and that it wouldn't endure.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated." But, reading the novel for the first time in a quarter of a century as I crossed the Atlantic, I was struck by the confidence of the then 33-year-old Rushdie's writing and the virtuosic handling of narrative switchbacks and subversions. That said, I do not tell Rushdie that I also watched an in-flight episode of Peep Show in which Mark Corrigan seems to sum up many people's misgivings about the book when he tells a date: "Good luck with Midnight's Children. Nobody ever finishes it." "I wasn't confident at all when I wrote Midnight's Children," counters Rushdie. "It was all just a trick. My first novel [Grimus, from 1975] had done less than zero and had been trashed. I had four or five other unpublishable novels too, so I felt like a failed writer. At the time, Ian [McEwan], Martin [Amis] and Julian [Barnes] had had great successes. All my contemporaries were like Ferraris, leaving me at the starting grid." But something good did come out of his failure of a literary debut.

Rushdie spent the £700 advance he got for it on leaving London and touring the country of his birth. The trip catalysed his imagination. There he realised that the cool prose that "Indian writers such as RK Narayan, Anita Desai and others" had appropriated from EM Forster was not enough to capture the country. More importantly, he realised he could write something that would "presumptuously and self-defeatingly" try to capture India's polymorphous spirit in a single book. "Don't get me wrong - I love Forster. In fact I knew him at King's [College, Cambridge] when I was there. He served me tea and I recognised him as someone brave enough to have been anti-imperialist in A Passage to India. But the Forsterian way of writing coolly and classically did not match the India I saw. It wasn't cool, it was hot. It's a country where, even if you're in a rural area, you're never alone. I wanted to write the literary equivalent of a crowd.

So it was a trick, a deliberate attempt to have too much incident so that you feel pushed this way and that, as if you're in a crowd." Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on June 19 1947; his book dramatises the simultaneous births of India and his novel's hero Saleem Sinai at midnight on August 15 that year. Midnight's Children has had an afterlife: younger Indian novelists such as Booker-winner Kiran Desai and Rana Dasgupta have been profoundly influenced by his novel, he argues. "And then there's Amit Chaudhari. Barely a week goes by without Amit taking a swipe at Midnight's Children. So it has been influential even among those who hate it." For all that, it is hardly his best-known novel. It was his fourth, The Satanic Verses, that made him the world's most celebrated, if beleaguered, novelist. The novel was deemed to be so hostile to Islam that it provoked Iran's supreme ruler Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa in 1988 calling for Rushdie to be killed.

There was a failed attempt on his life, and others linked to the book were attacked, among them his Japanese translator, who was stabbed to death by, Rushdie believes, Iranian terrorists who entered Japan from China. Rushdie jokes about the fatwa with the audience at Temple Judea during his warm-up routine. "I don't want to dispute with Ayatollah Khomeini, but I will point out that only one of us is dead. That thing they say about the pen being mightier than the sword? Don't mess with novelists." How can Rushdie joke about the fatwa, I ask him? "Well, because what happened to me was not funny it was assumed that I'm not funny. From some of the circumstances of the attack, it was assumed that because the criticisms of my book were arcane and theological, my work must be arcane and theologicial. So there is a point to joking: to show that I was misrepresented during the fatwa period.

I am funny, and so are my books!" It is perhaps trite, though true, to point out that since 1999's operation on a tendon condition that had made his eyelids hang heavily, Rushdie no longer looks severe or supercilious, no more are his eyes sternly hooded. Instead, he looks puckishly young as he tells the audience of his pleasure in no longer being in the papers for the wrong reasons. "Martin Amis once said to me, 'You have vanished on to the front page.' Well, it's been a long journey from the front pages back to the book pages, but I'm very glad to be there." Rushdie speaks of the fatwa period as though it were over. And, indeed, in 1998 at the United Nations, the then Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi told British foreign secretary Robin Cook that Iran would restrain itself from threatening Rushdie's life. But many clerics, Iranian MPs and others have subsequently renewed calls for his murder.

When Rushdie was knighted last year, there were huge demonstrations in Pakistan and Malaysia calling for his death, while al-Qaida deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri is quoted as saying it was planning "a very precise response" to the honour, which he considered an "insult to Islam". At Temple Judea, one of the talk's organisers recalls that when Rushdie visited Miami to promote The Moor's Last Sigh in the mid-90s, the event was a word-of-mouth affair for security reasons. Tonight the reading has been well publicised. But the light security arrangements are a surprise: three police cruisers are parked outside the temple. Maybe - just maybe - the opprobrium for Rushdie is diminishing. Rushdie was heartened that when, six months ago, a German theatre company staged a version of The Satanic Verses, "people came, saw the play, liked it or hated it and went home. Nothing happened. I liked that. "I wasn't in favour of the fatwa, you see," he says, with mordant understatement. "In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

It is horrible and frightening and unexpected, and because you wrote the book, you feel responsible for the fear the fatwa created for people I cared about. My mother was living in Pakistan at the time. Several people who I counted close colleagues were killed. This was a very, very serious assault not just on principles but on individual human lives." Rushdie recalls the 1989 assassination attempt on his Norwegian publisher William Nygaard, who was shot outside his flat and left for dead. "I rang him in his hospital in Oslo. Had he not been very fit - he had been an Olympic skier for Norway - he would have died. I felt I needed to apologise because, as I told him, I think those bullets were meant for me. What did he say? This was a man on the edge of death, with three bullets in his spine. He said: 'I'm a grown-up person and I knew what I was doing in publishing this book.' And then he said something wonderful: 'By the way, I've just ordered a reprint.' So I have been able to witness the amazing courage of other people." What does he think of the stance of his good friends Martin Amis and Ian McEwan on Islam?

Amis described moderate Islam as "supine and inaudible" in the face of what he called "Islamism". He was also quoted in a newspaper interview as saying that he felt an "urge" to favour "discriminatory stuff" against Muslims living in Britain "until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children". Last month, McEwan joined the fray, telling a newspaper interviewer: "I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on." Does he agree there should be discrimination against Muslims? "I don't think there should be discrimination against anyone. Nor do I think Martin was advocating that. The point is this: I don't have to agree with what you or anybody says to defend their right to say it. To have Martin articulating a public fear in this rather knockabout way was justified. If we don't say what we think or articulate what is being generally thought, then we are self-censoring, which is wimpish.

"I thought the attack on Martin in the Guardian by Ronan Bennett [in an article published last November and condemned by McEwan] was out of order. To say he is racist because of that is wrong. I may not like the things you believe and, by the way, the fact that you believe them makes me think less of you as a person. I may despise you personally for what you believe, but I should be able to say it. Everybody needs to get thicker skins. There is this culture of offence, as though offending someone is the worst thing anyone can do. Again, there is an assumption that our first duty is to be respectful. But what would a respectful cartoon look like? Really boring! You wouldn't publish it. The nature of the form is irreverence and disrespect. "What pleases me, though, is that at least in Britain there is still the possibility of literary people writing on current affairs. Here [in the US], that's much less true. Who wouldn't have wanted to read Joan Didion's take on Hillary Clinton, or Don DeLillo writing about the US election?

In the past, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal could be public intellectuals, but there is much less scope for that now." But Rushdie has been one of those public intellectuals in America. In 2005, he wrote a piece for the Washington Post, arguing: "What is needed is a move beyond tradition, nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air." In his new novel, there is a barely concealed yearning among many of its characters for free expression, tolerance and sexual freedom and hedonism - ideas that he considers to be as much of the east as of the west. He even allows the emperor Akbar to muse, Lennon-like, on a world without religion. "If there hadn't been a god," says Akbar, "it might have been easier to work out what goodness is." The book flits between Mughal India and Renaissance Florence. "It's about the moment the east and west first engage. It's about what Spielberg would call close encounters of the third kind.

Each was the other's alien," he explains. But Rushdie has taken liberties: "This is at the time when Vasco da Gama was in Kerala, when the Portuguese were establishing a foothold in Goa. The thing that interested me was that there was no one going from India to the west. That pricked my novelistic sense of perversity." But it is not the novelistic perversity that is attracting attention. It is the sex. Four-times married, Rushdie has written a 10th novel that teems with raunchy scenes, much of it based on exhaustive research of Indian manuals. The book's eponymous heroine is a woman variously known as Qara Köz and Lady Black Eyes. She is expert in seven types of unguiculation which is - as Rushdie puts it - "the use of the nails to enhance the act of love". "I spent a lot of time doing the research, not just on Florentine history, Mughal history and not just into the Kama Sutra, but studying other texts about the erotic arts. It's not all about gymnastic positions.

There's stuff in the novel based on research about brews and potions formulated to help one have 97 successive ejaculations." I know what you're thinking: only 97? One reviewer described Lady Black Eyes as a precursor to Carla Bruni, but surely there is a better comparison - namely with the model and actor Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie's fourth wife, from whom he was divorced while he was writing The Enchantress of Florence. Last October, she published the couple's first post-divorce book, a cookery text enticingly entitled Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet. Rushdie denies that his book, which dramatises the travails of seductive beautiful women who break hearts and mastermind multiple orgasms across different continents, is a roman à clef. "It's not at all," he replies, "but you're free to read it otherwise. "Last year was a terrible year for me, and I really thought that I might not finish the book. There were difficult moments but I think that, like many writers, I have very strong habits of discipline. I mean, a carpenter doesn't not make a table just because his marriage is falling apart. He gets on with his job.

That's what I did. It was a force of will." Tonight he may not have a wife, but he has the consolation of the Miami crowd's approval, and - who knows? - the possibility that somewhere out there is the fifth Mrs Rushdie. The night is, after all, young, and Rushdie looks younger than his 61 years. Why does he think people come to hear him read, I ask, as he prepares to seduce the audience with tales of sex, cross-cultural fertilisation and neglected 16th-century history? "Some of them come for the freak show, but they're enjoying it by the end. As for me, I can't wait to get back to the writing. That's where I feel most alive." Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children wins 40-year Best of the Booker Prize | The Times Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children wins 40-year Best of the Booker Prize Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent Published at 12:00AM, July 11 2008 Almost 30 years ago, his novel Midnight’s Children saw off the competition to win the Booker Prize.

Today, Sir Salman Rushdie did it again, beating all previous Booker winners including the Nobel laureates Doris Lessing, J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer to carry away a one-off literary award celebrating the Booker’s 40th anniversary. Midnight’s Children, considered one of the most important works of the modern age, has been voted the greatest Booker Prizewinner in the history of the award. While his epic story set against the Partition of India was chosen in 1981 by a select panel of literary figures, it Subscribe now The Satanic Verses : Salman Rushdie : 9780670825370 The Satanic Verses US$24.76 US$27.95 You save US$3.19 Free delivery worldwide Add to basket Add to wishlist Description When a jumbo jet blows apart above the English Channel, Gabreel and Saladin are two who survive and are washed up on an English beach. However, it soon becomes clear that curious changes have come over them and that they have been chosen as protagonists in the eternal struggle between God and the Devil.

Salman Rushdie is the author of "Midnight's Children", winner of the 1981 Booker Prize, and "Shame". show more Product details 162.56 x 231.14 x 43.18mm | 725.74g Publication date Religious & Spiritual Fiction About Salman Rushdie Born in Bombay in 1947, Salman Rushdie is the author of six novels, including Grimus, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and a volume of essays, Imaginary Homelands. His numerous literary prizes include the Booker Prize for Midnight's Children and the Whitbread Prize for The Satanic Verses. show more Review Text This controversial novel, banned in India for its alleged blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammed, is a surreal hallucinatory feast. Rushdie (Midnight's Children; Shame, etc.), long a magical realist, turns finally to Islam for his jumping, off point, and his inventiveness never flags.

Satan, according to an epigraph by Defoe, has no fixed place to settle, and the difficulty of telling good from evil, the way that one reincarnates into the other, is the theme of this epic tale - which contains stories within stories, dreams within dreams. It begins with the explosion of a hijacked jumbo jet; Gibreel Farishta, a Bombay movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, an exile who lives in Britain, survive their free fall from the plane. Gibreel then presides over the dream/stow worlds of his "arehangelic other self" after he and Saladin are transformed into angelic or satanic opponents. (They are never certain which is which.) The central story concerns Mahound, the Prophet of Jahilia who founds the religion of "those who submit," which parallels Islam; another is about Ayesha, a contemporary visionary who leads a group of villagers to the sea, where she promises that the waves will part before them (they all drown, of course); yet another dream-story involves the Imam, a sort of grim Ayatollah.

Such a summary does the book a disservice, however, because all of these stories and many others besides are woven together with cross-references, psychic communications, brisk farces and satires, and interconnected picaresque. Rushdie does for Islam what Mark Helprin did (a little less successfully) for New York in his Winter's Tale: peoples it with fantastic figures that always seem close to some ineffable imaginative truth - even as Rushdie fast-cuts to the next scene in his phantasmagoric dream-time world. Whether it all finally holds together or not is almost beside the point: this is an entertainment in the highest sense of that much-exploited word. (Kirkus Reviews) show more Table of contents The Satanic VersesI. The Angel Gibreel II. Mahound III. Ellowen Deeowen IV. Ayesha V. A City Visible but Unseen VI. Return to Jahilia VII. The Angel Azraeel VIII. The Parting of the Arabian Sea IX. A Wonderful Lamp show more Follow us

Question: For which novel did author Salman Rushdie win a Booker Prize in 1981?
Answer: Midnight's Children